xthexder
@xthexder@l.sw0.com
- Comment on Fight me 2 days ago:
Ground-source heat pumps seem like they could be the new hotness. You don’t have to dig very deep before the ground is a constant temperature, so that can be used to increase the efficiency even further in extremely hot/cold weather.
Tech Ingredients did a nice little DIY experiment with it.
- Comment on Just answer the question you fuckin' nerd 4 days ago:
I take my coffee black-hole seriously.
- Comment on Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement 5 days ago:
TCP will generally send up to 10 packets immediately without waiting for the ACKs (depending on the configured window size).
Generally any messages or websites under 14kb will be transmitted in a single round-trip assuming no packets are dropped.
- Comment on Tragic Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site 6 days ago:
Well, it’s an order of magnitude less force than the “server room” experienced, considering the whole rack of computers was compressed into a solid mass.
SanDisk SD cards are actually rated for up to 500Gs, and with how light the SD card is, it can survive these indirect impacts more easily. “1000s of Gs” is just a completely random estimate considering how some of the other heavier internal camera parts were damaged (a circuit board connector sheared off).
- Comment on Tragic Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site 6 days ago:
They used 3 mini PCs with SSDs, which all of them were completely smashed and unrecoverable. the flash chips were all cracked or missing.
- Comment on Tragic Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site 6 days ago:
The SD card was from inside a titanium cased underwater camera that was mounted outside the hull. It wasn’t actually in the implosion, it just survived the shockwave (which was probably 1000s of Gs, so still impressive)
- Comment on DIY YouTuber builds cheap VR headset and makes it open-source 1 week ago:
Yeah, I’d expect this to be similar latency and accuracy. Lighthouse can do full 6dof tracking at a room scale too, not just sitting head tracking for a seated position like it seems opentrack does
- Comment on EU Chat Control didnt pass - proving the media got to alot of you 2 weeks ago:
What does any of this have to do with the government forcing backdoors into otherwise encrypted chats? The point is that nobody but the recipient can read it, not even governments.
- Comment on kurzgesagt – AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel 2 weeks ago:
the CEO of Kurzgesagt word that they would not have made the videos if they hadn’t been paid to
This on its own proves nothing bad. Some videos just require a bigger budget to make and can’t be made on their otherwise limited budget. Or the topic is just lower priority due to writer interests. If they were forced into covering specific topics then that’s a different story, but I haven’t seen any evidence that was the case.
- Comment on Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time 3 weeks ago:
Sounds like a good way to AI-wash any accounting fraud. Now you can just blame it on Microsoft.
- Comment on Apple has REMOVED the ICEBlock app from the App Store due to “objectionable content.” 3 weeks ago:
A famously useful tool for saving miners from suffocation?
- Comment on 'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds 4 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure Hindenburg would have been able to land somewhere instead of crashing out of the air if it used Helium. The surface catching fire wouldn’t spread nearly as quickly as the cells exploding with hydrogen gas. I’m not sure what material the cells were made out of, but I doubt it burns like flash paper.
- Comment on The 2025 Ig Nobel Prize Winners 5 weeks ago:
35th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize What? You can’t have 35 “First” annual events
- Comment on A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over? 5 weeks ago:
$60k a year is not enough to live comfortably in most of the cities with tech hubs. Rent alone would be 60+% of your paycheck, plus utilities and a car to get to work, you might be going hungry.
- Comment on Get ready to see ads on your… Samsung refrigerator 5 weeks ago:
All the terrible touch features they’re adding to cars these days makes me think a brand new car today would go obsolete before a 10 year old used car with 100k miles. New cars are unrepairable because of how complicated they are.
- Comment on Get ready to see ads on your… Samsung refrigerator 5 weeks ago:
Even the $3000 Samsung TVs have afs if you connect them to the Internet. Noone is safe
- Comment on Beggars can't be choosers 1 month ago:
Usually the opposite is true when gutters are this clogged. They turn into a swamp.
- Comment on Bye Intel, hi AMD! I’m done after 2 dead Intels 1 month ago:
I’ve got a 9700X and it absolutely rips at only 65W
- Comment on Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch for users 1 month ago:
The trusted 3rd party in this case is actually multiple 3rd parties. There’s several options for trusted timestamping just like there’s multiple trusted root CAs for SSL. Since the timestamping service is free and public, anyone can use it to sign anything, even self-signed certificates. There’s no mechanism to deny access, at least for this portion.
There’s always a risk the root CAs all collude and refuse to give out certificates to people they don’t like, but at least so far this hasn’t been a problem. I don’t have a better solution unfortunately. If we could have a 100% decentralized signing scheme that would be ideal, but I have no idea how you would build such a thing without identity verification and some inherit trust in the system
- Comment on Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch for users 1 month ago:
This isn’t “my idea”, this is how the industry already does code signing. You can’t sign something with a date of 1984 because your certificate has a start and end date, and is usually only valid for 1 year.
You can read more about how this works here: …digicert.com/…/rfc3161-compliant-time-stamp-auth…
- Comment on Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch for users 1 month ago:
Code signing certificates work a little differently than SSL certificates. A timestamp is included in the signature so the certificate only needs to be valid at the time of signing. The executable will remain valid forever, even if the certificate later expires. (This is how it works on Windows)
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 month ago:
Loads of new technologies are discovered because of people mixing disciplines that hadn’t been put together before. A new perspective on a problem can make a massive difference!
- Comment on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline 1 month ago:
That’s probably true, but it sure can be hard to motivate yourself to do things yourself when that AI dice roll is right there to give you an immediate dopamine hit. I’m starting to see things like vibecoding being as addictive as gambling. Personally I don’t use AI because I see all the subtle ways it’s wrong when programming, and the more I pay attention to things like AI search results, it seems like there’s almost always something misrepresented or subtly incorrect in the output, and for any topics I’m not already fluent in, I likely won’t notice these things until it’s already causing issues
- Comment on Ice obtains access to Israeli-made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps 1 month ago:
- biometrics
This means you only enter the password when your phone restarts, you access specific settings, or I think one or two other rare cases. Personally I only need to enter my pin maybe once a week
- Comment on Ice obtains access to Israeli-made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps 1 month ago:
That’s for breaking a bcrypt hash, and I don’t believe there’s any way to extract the pin hash from a phone since it happens inside a secure hardware layer (like a TPM). If it is possible, the attacker would most likely have to physically destroy your phone to get at it. To bruteforce a 4 digit pin with retry lockout timers, it takes 16 hours to try all combinations, according to a tool I found that auto-enters pins via usb keyboard emulation.
- Comment on YouTube is now flagging accounts on Premium family plans that aren't in the same household 1 month ago:
Sponsorblock works perfectly fine on Firefox Mobile
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 1 month ago:
That’s unfortunate. Personally I can barely tell all the black rectangles apart. It’s a utility for me, not a fashion accessory. Maybe if it was, I’d have an iPhone
- Comment on No justice, no peace. 1 month ago:
Doing some quick math and numbers pulled from wikipedia, Lead is about 14-15x as effective by volume compared to water at blocking gamma radiation.
I think far more significant in saving the other scientists was the inverse square law. The radiation energy falls off with the square of distance, so Slotin would have received a significantly higher dose just from being right next to it.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 1 month ago:
I used my last phone for about 4 years. At that point the battery life was getting worse, and the coating to prevent smudges and make your finger slide easily had worn off in the middle. Even then it’s still perfectly usable, I just wanted an upgrade.
I don’t understand the people that upgrade every year or two. In the last 5 years basically the only new development has been higher refresh rate displays and faker looking (more processed) camera images…
